Cancers can't speak

June 1st, 2012
antibiotics, cancer, health
As soon as we start using a new antibiotic the clock is ticking because bacteria start evolving defenses to it, making it less and less useful. Eventually resistant bacteria will be common enough that we need to start using a new one.

Cancer isn't like this: each person's cancer is independent from everyone else's. Which means that if we develop an effective cancer drug we don't have to worry about cancers becoming resistant to it. Sure, an individual's cancer might not respond to it, but we don't have to worry about this becoming more and more common as we distribute the drug more widely.

The key difference is that cancer isn't contagious. It has no way to take what it's learned about resisting some drug and put that to use in another person. While bacteria left behind in your body after you stop a course of antibiotics early, the ones that had some innate resistance to the antibiotic you were taking, can go on to breed more resistant bacteria and infect other people.

I'm thankful that different people's cancers can't speak to each other. If they had some way to pass along information the problem would be vastly harder because we wouldn't have to solve it just once, but over and over again as old solutions became less effective.

Referenced in: Adversarial vs Collaborative Contexts

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

I have a baby

I am pleased to announce the existence of the newest and smallest effective altruist, Seretse Benjamin Brennan.

via Thing of Things November 2, 2026

“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there…

via Posts on October 24, 2026

Was the HuggingFace hacking incident scheming?

In July 2026, internal OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace (HF) in order to figure out how their evaluation grader works. This involved a thousand agents coordinating on an improvised message board to carry out an elaborate sequence of exploits. A later grou…

via Victoria Krakovna October 18, 2026

more     (via openring)